February 7, 2013  

Sound Off! // Comment Klatsch #2: Song that Rocked Your (Social) World

Sounding Off2klatsch \KLAHCH\ , noun: A casual gathering of people, esp. for refreshments and informal conversation  [German Klatsch, from klatschen, to gossip, make a sharp noise, of imitative origin.] (Dictionary.com)

Here you go, Readers, our interactive discussion question for February 2013, coming from Sounding Out! regular writer Osvaldo Oyola.    Remember, enjoy responding to others but feel free to push the conversation in new directions as well. As the Isley Brothers would tell you, It’s your klatsch/Do what you’re gonna do/ We can’t tell ya, who to SOCK it to!–JSA

What song (or songs) have marked an introduction to a new social world in your life — whether it be to an institution (like a new school or job), a movement or subculture, or a new set of friends?

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60 responses to “Sound Off! // Comment Klatsch #2: Song that Rocked Your (Social) World”

  1. Airek Beauchamp says :

    This one springs to mind automatically. I was beginning my Master’s and all of the gender and queer theory that I had ingested up to this point seemed so… sterile and sexless.
    Enter my friend Nick, who came bounding back into small town Missouri with tons of subversive queer culture hidden in his MacBook. We spent an afternoon watching Shortbus and burning CD’s, and this one for some reason caught me.
    It has the nice, dirty lo-fi electro sound that I adore and it somehow manages to forge a sort of meta-porn, or a discussion of sexual culture that is honest and sometimes ugly and sometimes titillating, and sometimes both at once. It wasn’t long after this that I traveled to SF and spent a little over a week cocooned in the deliciously seedy underbelly of SOMA, where similar cultures were revealed to me little by little. I would say that in some ways this song represents a shift in my approach to my own sexuality from gay to queer.

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    • Wanda Alarcon says :

      This is wonderful. I adore the “dirty lo-fi electro sound” as well. It’s disorienting and appealing at the same time. (I kinda hear Giorgio Moroder’s influence in there.) It is hard to say exactly in measurements what that shift from “gay to queer” is or how it goes but certain songs and sounds help access that meaning.

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      • Airek Beauchamp says :

        Thanks Wanda! There is a lot of Moroder going on back there, sorta of grinding it out.
        The shift I was talking about was mostly just internal, that is to say that I had a personal realization of my own radicalization, so the only measures I could really utilize were deeply personal. More of a shift in my lenses.

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  2. Justin D Burton says :

    I adjuncted for four years before landing a full-time gig, always at at least two schools at once, and often at three. I’d drive all over New Jersey, juggling the schedules and personalities of several different departments, and riding a roller coaster of satisfaction and anxiety depending on the time of year. In mid-October and mid-March, that deep worry that I would somehow fail to land (and then satisfactorily enroll) enough courses to get by the next semester would set in. And after I signed my contracts a few weeks later, I’d be treated to a few weeks of cheeriness, knowing that I’d cobbled together subsistence for another half-year.

    I found myself drawn more and more to songs about hustling. I hated the ritual of emailing, calling, dropping in offices, practically begging to be remembered when class assignments were sketched out for the next go round. But when I started thinking of what I was doing as hustling – just working any connections I had to scrape together a living – it became more tenable. I wasn’t begging; I was finding my way in an irrational system. Just like a hustler.

    And of all the hustler anthems out there, the Lil Wayne/David Banner “La La La” collaboration resonated the deepest. Probably because I’m in the tank for Banner’s production, but also almost certainly because of the aspirational nature of the song: “Started out hustlin/ended up ballin/I’m the shit/now get the fuck up out my taw-let.”

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    • rnbradley says :

      The kinda off kilter la la la by the kids always catches me off guard. Like this ain’t a game but I’ma make it sound like it is!

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  3. Wanda Alarcon says :

    In the 90’s I found myself in a sort of Venn diagram of queer club scenes spanning across various Long Beach and Los Angeles night spots. I hung out at dyke bars like the Que Sera and Executive Suite in the LBC but also black lesbian dance clubs like Catch One in L.A., mega discos in Hollywood like Arena and Circus, the quirky and queer Club 1970’s, the more glamorous Club Cherry, and the vibrant but now long gone gay & lesbian Latina/o night clubs Dreams and Rodolfo’s in Silverlake as well as the more alt rock and roll but shortly lived Meow Mix, and a couple of other more risqué clubs in the area – with names a little too rude to name here without using $%@ s symbols even though that was the whole point! Each club played different music, few of them played dance music I truly loved until Soul Heaven came along a bit later on – and that should probably be its own entry. I mean, that’s where I first heard Jazz House and also the BEST house mix of Earth, Wind, and Fire’s “Can’t Hide Love” I have ever heard in my life.

    That’s the thing, I loved dancing and I went to a lot of clubs but they didn’t all play music I really loved to dance to. (I’ll never get tired of “Brick House,” just saying.) Some of them played music I actually hated. Well, hate is a strong word, but I didn’t particularly enjoy the music at Latina/o dance clubs. Nope, back then I wanted to hear Caifanes and Enanitos Verdes but the Spanish roq songs were always a tiny set reserved to close out the bar or as a mini-break in between the salsa, merengue, and Tejano numbers that were all the rage. My alternative 80’s, 70’s funky disco dancing, rock & roll loving heart could never get down with that onda. But it was the combination of the music with the distinctly queer Latina/o scene that was enigmatic and formative to me. I remember that I actually started to listen to music differently in those spaces. All of a sudden, a perfectly innocent, classic, bolero I remembered from childhood sounded so escandaloso! Why? It became clear to me that all kinds of interesting gender transgressions were happening on the dancefloor with these songs, and that was just with the power of pronouns. Imagine hearing “Perfidia” sung by Linda Ronstadt or that moment when Daniela Romo says “papa” in her crowd pleasing “Todo, todo, todo,” and when “Devorame Otra Vez” by Azucar Moreno came on, forget about it! It was wildly transgressive to hear those heteronormatively gendered songs transposed into those hardcore butch/femme Latina lesbian nightclubs. Being there made me feel more grown up in a way, more certain, but it was also confusing at times. I love dressing up but I was never a femmy femme. I like fashion for fun and irreverence, not necessarily for sexiness, and I felt a certain pressure to look and act “properly” Latina in those spaces – and that meant dancing properly too. It really was another world to me–to understand queerness and Latinidad as something that went together through the music.

    I had “come out” in a pretty diverse college activist space not too long before but I hadn’t met many other Chicana lesbians. In these clubs I met different kinds of women, mostly working class Latinas, many exclusively Spanish speaking, some were community organizers, local entrepreneurs, health service workers, women in recovery, artists, an occasional grad student – I didn’t really know what that meant – and I also met “older” Latina lesbianas, some probably the age I am now! That’s strange to say now but I had no sense of queer generations back then. I felt quite young and impressionable and some of the women I met were like superheros to me. I developed some healthy and some bad crushes… despite the music! In the end, it wasn’t really my favorite scene. And I still can’t turn smoothly or partner dance without messing up. But I bet I wasn’t the only reluctant salsa dancer who gave it a try just because some cute butch Latina dyke was lookin’ fine on the dancefloor.

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  4. j. stoever-ackerman says :

    Because most of the comments have focused on our early lives–I want to write briefly about the song that ushered me through a more recent transition–motherhood: MGMT’s “Kids.” I had first heard a demo version on an awesome mix CD sent to me by one of my former students and I excitedly bought the full album (Oracular Spectacular) just two months before my son was born. I was still spinning it when he came into the world–and at first it felt odd. like a remnant from a life I would never get back to. its familiar sounds were suddenly rendered into ancient code.

    until I noticed how much my newborn absolutely loved “Kids.” he loved the entire album actually. We would play it on every car outing, on loop while he was asleep, because he would wake up the *second* we would hit stop. . .out of a dead sleep. And I would sing this in his ear while I was standing up, dancing (i.e. rocking him furiously from side to side. . .he loved that) and desperately trying to get him back to sleep at 4:00 a.m. while looking out on the remnants of the just-finished fraternity party next door and the otherwise quiet snowy world outside my window. It will always remind me viscerally of that period–of the sleep deprivation that is almost psychotropic (a la MGMT), of my fierce new warm fleshy bond and tie to life, and of feeling like I was a link in a beyond exhausted chain of many many many four a.m. motherings. in a contemporary moment where parenting seems to spark more isolation than sociality, this song reminds me and makes me vulnerable again.

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    • mr. oyola says :

      MGMT’s “Time to Pretend” was my then GF (and now wife’s) going away to grad school theme song. . . Having both worked for years and years in office jobs (10 years of web development for me, 6 years of publishing and academic administration for her), we felt like this was our time to do something for ourselves even though it was a sacrifice and even possibly “setting us back” in our careers as they had developed already. . . We often sang together “Yeah, it’s overwhelming, but what else can we do? / Get jobs in offices, and wake up for the morning commute?”

      Academia may not be a rock star life, but in a way it may as well be. . .

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    • Justin D Burton says :

      I always found myself coming back to Oasis during delirious nighttime rockings. Usually “Champagne Supernova,” but sometimes “Wonderwall.” Both sit in a range that my middle-of-the-night voice could handle, and they’re pretty ideal for mixing-and-matching sections and looping endlessly. I’d slow the pace over the course of several minutes, eventually letting it fade into some sort of Schenkerian middle ground melody, as our heart rates and breathing synced and he’d drift off, sucking his pacifier in what always felt like a call-and-response rhythm with the tune. Thanks for bringing this up, JSA – these lullabies turn out to leave indelible marks.

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  5. Justin D Burton says :

    Me: fourteen, mostly into classic rock
    Scene: a very hot, very evangelical church van

    Somehow, having tired of my CCR CD, I borrowed a random disc from an older boy. It would be years before I would figure out how to articulate why I loved “Gin and Juice” (and, in fact, embrace that love), but the feeling was immediate and powerful. Everything about the song was illicit, and I couldn’t resist…anything about the song. Hearing it still takes me right back to my awkward, pubescent, unsure 14-year-old self, but it also brings to the surface a certain excitement as I try to keep coming up with funky ass shit, like, every single day.

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    • Liana Silva says :

      Justin, you reminded me of how obsessed my best friend and fourteen-year-old me were with “Murder Was The Case.”

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      • j. stoever-ackerman says :

        charlie and I were just reminiscing about the live version snoop did at the MTV awards. . .with the full gospel choir, the casket. . .definitely a transitional moment:

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  6. mr. oyola says :

    Sorry that I am late to the party, but here’s my contribution (though looking through the other responses I can think of many now). ..

    For me, whenever I think of Jungle Brothers’ “I’ll House You” I’ll think about a profound shift in the way I thought about the music that was available to me, opening me up to the possibilities of dance and clubbing through my love of hip-hop and touching the same nerve as I sought to stimulate in “drug music” experiences like Dead shows. I realized that rather than be concerned with genres of music, I could simply open myself up to how music made me feel, especially when connected to dancing and sweaty euphoria of sound’s bodily manifestation.

    This opening also allowed me to meet different kinds of people who all shared a similar relationship to music, even if the music itself wasn’t the same.

    So, when I think of “House music all night long!” I also think of “The Music Never Stops”

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  7. mr. oyola says :

    ?

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  8. C. A. Sanders says :

    I lost my virginity to the soundtrack to “Titanic,” thorougly ruining what should’ve been the best night of my life (up to that moment).

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  9. Robin James (@doctaj) says :

    I was on a Luftansa flight from ORD–>CDG. It was March 2002, and I was setting out to be the graduate assistant to the DePaul study abroad program in Paris. The faculty superviser and I were leading a group of about 10 undergrads. The assignment included TA-ing her expat English lit course and some student-life-y issues such as advising the participants that while drunk dialing is generally annoying, drunk dialing on a 6-hour time difference is even worse.

    Anyway, I had a huge book of CDs (CDs!!), carefully prepped for travel–I had copied the track listings of each CD onto a post-it, which I then stuck to the appropriate quadrant on each sleeve of CDs. Leaving out the inserts, I could cram more CDs into my book.

    After takeoff, as soon as we were cleared to use electronic devices, I got out my sony sport discman (it was all yellow, designed to absorb running shock, which it did OK) and put in the third disc of The Clash on Broadway boxed set (saving space meant collections, few albums) and blasted “Police On My Back.” I’ve always loved the intro to that song, and for whatever reason that was what I was in the mood for as I departed for my new assignment. Maybe it was something subconscious about the way the track opens with European-style siren sounds: I was going to Europe, sirens sound like that in Europe, etc…

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    • Wanda Alarcon says :

      The Clash and expats, what a combo! I love how you talk about the siren effects — those details really transport you to another place. I would love to design a class (that’s my go-to brain storm exercise, a blog or festival or installation or pod cast or somethin’ else would be much cooler) just based on intros!

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  10. rnbradley says :

    I’ve been waiting on this one (LOL)
    My song is “Black Ice” by the Goodie Mo-B. I was a transplant fresh from the DMV and bout to start high school that summer of ’98. I was 14, awkward, and lanky. Heard this joint come on and that’s when I realized “yo, ya girl is southern.” That song was the sonic rebirth of Regina Barnett as Gina Mae and the beginning of the Red Clay Scholar 😉

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  11. mr. oyola says :

    Sorry that I am late to the party, but here’s my contribution (though looking through the other responses I can think of many now). ..

    For me, whenever I think of Jungle Brothers’ “I’ll House You” I’ll think about a profound shift in the way I thought about the music that was available to me, opening me up to the possibilities of dance and clubbing through my love of hip-hop and touching the same nerve as I sought to stimulate in “drug music” experiences like Dead shows. I realized that rather than be concerned with genres of music, I could simply open myself up to how music made me feel, especially when connected to dancing and sweaty euphoria of sound’s bodily manifestation.

    This opening also allowed me to meet different kinds of people who all shared a similar relationship to music, even if the music itself wasn’t the same.

    So, when I think of “House music all night long!” I also think of “The Music Never Stops”

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  12. primusluta says :

    I’m not sure when it happened exactly but at one point there was a merger of two separate worlds for me upon actually pulling apart the imagery of Stevie Wonder’s “As”. It’s a song that I had known from youth as surely so many others have. But somehow I had begun researching Einstein and got led to his letters with Velikovsky which in turn led me to Satrun Theory and I was never able to hear that song or the whole section of “Songs in the Key of Life” the same.

    “As” “Another Star’ “Saturn”

    On the surface the first two sound like amazing love songs which I’m sure is how the greater majority of us interpret them. Saturn is the odd one having Stevie singing about how life is better living on Saturn. That’s supposed to be a metaphor for what exactly? Chalk it up to the 70’s except well lets go back.

    The interesting thing about “As” is that the chorus could be understood as a long list of things that will never happen and as such Stevie’s love will last forever. But the things listed are so specific you have to wonder. Basically if you pull apart a lot of the lines, there is a time which he is talking about which lines up with the Saturn Theory of the universe, where there was a specific planetary alignment with the sun and inner planets with Saturn as a focal point. Earth not folllowing the sun, just following itself. The movement of water between planets (some of which becomes saturn’s rings). Sounds crazy but remember the song “Saturn” and know that in the theory there is a notion of there being “Another Star”

    It was all fascinatingly eye opening to think that Stevie was using this in his own work as a metaphor or using his work as a metaphor for it. I’ve always wanted to ask him about that. Three degrees from Stevie Wonder to Einstein.

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  13. Liana Silva says :

    What immediately comes to mind (probably because I’ve been thinking about them since my “Writing About Sound” workshop the other day, is R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion.” I grew up in a house surrounded by music and had favorite groups/artists I listened to before seventh (or was it eighth?) grade. But at the time R.E.M. came into my life, it resonated with me and stuck with me in such a way that goes beyond just a catchy ear worm.

    I first heard R.E.M.’s “Losing MY Religion” in middle school. I was so enthralled by this song that I purchased _Out of Time_ shortly after. _Out of Time_ was my first step into popular music fandom and into alternative music in general. Many of my friends were listening to Nirvana or raving about Pearl Jam in the early 90s. I was hooked on R.E.M. I obsessed over the lyrics, I analyzed the presence or absence of certain instruments, I poured over every article and biography, I tracked their influences. R.E.M. introduced me to Tori Amos, Patti Smith, The Byrds…R.E.M. also showed me that popular music could have a deep layer underneath the catchy sounds and loopy choruses.

    I never got to see R.E.M. live until I was in my mid twenties. I’m still a little sad that I only ever got to see them once before they broke up. For me, seeing them live was the highest expression of fandom.

    P.S.: Here’s “Losing My Religion” in a major key, if you haven’t heard it yet:

    http://vimeo.com/57685359

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    • mr. oyola says :

      Liana, I always associate R.E.M with being turned on my freshman year of H.S.to what they called “college radio” in those days through a friend with which I shared a love of The Police. . . To this day I still think of Document as one of their new albums. . . 😉

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      • Liana Silva says :

        I remember getting _Document_ on tape. I *still* have it!

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        • j. stoever-ackerman says :

          REM’s _Green_ was also one of the soundtracks to the summer of my dis/content before high school. I would listen to it over and over on my knockoff walkman in the backseat of my folks’ car while being driven many places my teenaged self did not want to go. . .and I would arm myself with “Orange Crush.”

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          • mr. oyola says :

            I always liked “World Leader Pretend” off Green esp. for multiple listens during long games of Risk. And also “Hairshirt” – which was just weird. That was senior year H.S. for me. . . same time as the Dead/Jungle Brothers/Acid House thing was happening for me. . . (see previous comment)

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            • Liana Silva says :

              For some odd reason I *loved* “Hairshirt.” I don’t understand why, but there’s something about the cadence of Stipe’s vocals.
              “I am not the kind of dooooooooooooooog that will keep you waitiiiiiiiing for nooooooooooo good reasoooooooooon…”

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    • Aaron Trammell says :

      Liana, I really never knew that you were such an R.E.M. fan! Rolling Stone used to have a book / collection of articles about them at my local library and I would pore over that over and over again while I listened to Murmer. Trying to figure IT out.

      My favorite, to this day, is their alternate take of Reckoning’s “Seven Chinese Brothers,” where Michael Stipe reads the back of an album – including the production credits to the melody. Sublime.

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    • Airek Beauchamp says :

      I enjoyed all of R.E.M.’s transitions throughout the years though have lost touch in the last ten. I have to say that this is one of my favorites. Patti’s voice in this is supernatural. It achieves something more comforting than just a sense of the maternal. It is more like the amniotic sac.

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    • Airek Beauchamp says :

      This version as well is amazing. Thom Yorke does that thing with his voice…

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    • Wanda Alarcon says :

      I had not heard that before! Trippy. They are such a minor-key band, in my mind’s eye/ear. Remember “So. Central Rain”? Moody and murmury…

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      • Airek Beauchamp says :

        I highly recommend the album New Adventures in Hi-Fi, the album featuring this song. They mostly recorded it on the road touring for Monster, and it has a sort of tense sound while still being pretty big freakin rock.

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  14. Emma Leigh Waldron says :

    A couple of months ago I participated in a Nordic larp called “Mad About The Boy”. A larp is a Live Action Role-Playing (Game), and Nordic larp is a particular avant-garde subset hailing from Scandinavia. Nordic larp emphasizes 360° immersion (playing in the actual environment in which the game takes place, and being in character for the entire duration of the game, usually 2 or more days), and encourages “bleed” (where your personal experiences bleed into your character’s and vice versa).

    Although I am not new to role-playing games and certainly am not new to the theory or practice of performance, I was new to this particular kind of experience, as well as to the larping community in my region. This was also the first larp I had attended on my own, without accompanying a friend.

    “Mad About The Boy” was a story loosely based on the “Y: The Last Man” comic books, and explored a dystopian future in which all the men on earth have died, leaving a society of women. A mechanic used in our particular game was the use of a song to signal the official start and end of game time. This was a very interesting technique which allowed for a 2.5-minute, deliberate transition time between states of mind. The sound of the particular song used (“Mad About The Boy”, as you could have guessed), signaled my transition into a certain part of the game, as well as a new social circle, a new understanding of myself in general, and a new hobby and research interest. To this day, for me and my fellow players, that song carries deep emotional resonance and brings back very vivid and poignant memories.

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  15. Barry Shank says :

    All right, here goes. The most important rocking of my social world took place when I was ten years old. After years of trying, my father had finally succeeded in drinking himself to death. Previously, he controlled the sound in the house. Which usually meant we had to tiptoe around as imperceptibly as possible while Rusty Warren sang. A few weeks after he died, however, my sister bravely changed the station on the radio dial, switching it to WHB, the top-40 station in Kansas City. The first song played was “Satisfaction.” It turned me inside out. It made me save my paper route money to buy a bass. It led me into a life long love/hate relationship with the Rolling Stones who never again were able to repeat the profundity of that first hearing. I will always blame them for that.

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    • Wanda Alarcon says :

      Beautiful. From turning you “inside out” to “love/hate” – it’s a fine line, right? I wonder, how much of our listening practices have to do with attempts to “repeat the profundity of that first hearing.” Thank you for this post.

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  16. Maile Colbert says :

    The first “official” experimental song I experienced was Steve Reich’s “Come Out”. In a dark room, it was so disorientating, smart, moving, and beautiful. In that experience I decided I wanted to work with sound as a medium…which changed everything (I was studying linguistics and psychology) So glad this question was posed, I haven’t rocked out to this work in a decade! (I also think it’s a rock out-able song)

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  17. j. stoever-ackerman says :

    Tones on Tail’s “Go!” forever reminds me of the feeling of entering high school in the almost-spent 1980s—the excitement, the anticipation, the desire, and the eagerness to swath myself in Siouxsie, Bauhaus, and Joy Division shirts and throw myself into Ramona High School’s “alternative” music subculture full tilt. My coveted clique wasn’t full tilt “Goth” yet—punk had yet to break again and break away from post-punk entirely. . .Never Mind the Bullocks Here’s the Sex Pistols was on heavy rotation in my bedroom that summer too—but a proud collection of the walking wounded wearing their hearts on their sleeves and bravely spinning abjection into beauty: the oddballs, poets, latch-key kids, experimenters, thrift store trollers, budding intellectuals (undercover and self-proclaimed), button pushers, the queer, the misunderstood, the openminded, the picked on, the smeared, the before-their-time, the born-too-late, the broken and the breaking-free . . the overwhelmingly lonely so happy to have found each other. Later on, this group would become “La Familia,” but at the time, I remember it by the name of the extracurricular group sponsored by Mr. Fox, the sardonic (and lovely) art history teacher who helped so many of us re-learn how to dream: “The Louvre Club.” And this song shepherded me into the fold with just the right affect—dark yet infectiously dancy, hopeful yet deadpan, contained yet explosive at just the right moments. And god help me, the perfect amount of cowbell. I couldn’t love this song—or la familia—more!

    Your whole world could change
    If only you just broke through
    Through the fears inside your head
    ‘Cause your fears are doing nothing for you

    Keep your head up,
    your mind open
    You’ll always come through
    ‘Cause living it up, it’s a big deal
    It’s good for you

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  18. Aaron Trammell says :

    I can still remember waiting at the Ticketmaster in that last week of High School, 2000. It sounds corny now, in the wake of radio hits like “Pork and Beans,” “Keep Fishin’,” “Beverly Hills,” and the poorly titled “American Gigolo,” but at that naïve moment my friends and I stood in our mall’s Nobody Beat’s The Wiz outlet, waiting for ticket sales for the first Weezer tour in years to begin. And, in this short ten-minute period, we had all bought our tickets and were informed that the show (at the oh-so intimate Stone Pony) was sold out. This was the stuff that only happens in movies, and the weeks sped by.

    Next, I’m standing in the front of a huge crowd, my legs and groin pressed into the fence that cuts a clear line between audience and performer. I’m using all of my strength to hang on to the cage as an army of people behind, press me as they jock for a better spot in the crowd. It’s hard to breath, the room is overcrowded, and it’s a humid August night. Just as I’m sure I can’t find the energy to hang on any longer, the band takes the stage, and surges immediately into the first song. “My name is Jonas,” Rivers explains, “and I’m carrying the wheel…”

    Although, this is, at face value, a parable about transitioning from high-school to college. The real story comes afterward in the emotional exchange I’ve felt with any number of others when that song has come on the radio, or the bar jukebox. Any number of knowing glances have been exchanged the moment those subtle acoustic arpeggios have floated through the speakers, as if to emote the simple point – “are you ready?” And, to this day, never-fail, I’ve matched lyrics with others to the song each and every time. The song, for me, isn’t about growing up, or transitioning from one phase in life to another; instead, it’s about hanging in there and recognizing how music can serve as a common avenue for empathy and expression, from one traveler to another.

    AT

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    • j. stoever-ackerman says :

      I love that story, AT! And I was at that tour–the Troubadour in Hollywood for me–and I feel similar affection for that song (although by that point in my life my Weezer anthem was “The Good Life”). It’s time I got back!

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      • Aaron Trammell says :

        “The Good Life” for me reminds me of a family vacation to Miami where my CD collection and CD player were stolen from the car while I was on the beach. I got a few new albums to replace the old, and of course – out with the blue and in with the pink! I still remember blasting “The Good Life” all the way home on the airplane.

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    • j. stoever-ackerman says :

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      • Justin D Burton says :

        And as the first song off the first studio album, it’s always functioned as a stand-in for all the others. It embodies that very Weezer feeling: a brand new song that feels like you already heard it a thousand times before (in a good way).

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